You need to format the disk in drive G:

[mplep]

Hi,

I'm testing Veeam 4.1.2 in Virtual Appliance mode within an ESXi 4.0/4.1 environment with Veeam running upon a Server 2008 64bit VM. Veeam is sitting in our DR site (100MB leased line) and can address the live VM's datastore via iSCSI. After the initial seeding backup job completed yesterday I started a manual job today. After a couple of VM's had completed (very quickly I must add) a Windows prompt appeared saying "You need to format the disk in drive G: before you can use it", "Do you want to format it?" I obviously clicked "Cancel", but was concerned to see this appear. The job seemed to stop until I selected "Cancel". I can see that the VA mode mounts the VM disks as drive letters within Windows, so G was one of the VM disks being backed up. The job appeared to continued and that VM reported backup was a success. Any ideas on why this happened and how to avoid it happening again?

PS. I did have Windows Explorer open (but minimised) during my session.

Thanks

MPLEP

[mplep]

Update: I returned to the session and had the same prompt onscreen but for the H: drive this time. Windows Explorer was not open this time however. I think the sessions do continue to run even with this message onscreen.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello, try disabling autoplay functionality in the control panel of a Windows 2008 machine, should help. Thanks!

[Gostev]

You want to disable automount on your Veeam Backup server.

[mplep]

Thanks for the quick replies. I've disabled autoplay now.

[ThinkGrid]

Hi

I am receiving the above mentioned error come up a few times during the backups and it keeps crashing my Veeam application, sometimes freezing it and have to reboot the Server and kills all the running backups

Anyone seen it ?



Thanks
Petrit

[Gostev]

Hi, do you have automount disabled on your Veeam Backup server?

[ThinkGrid]

Hi Gostev

Can you tell me where that Setting is please ?

Thanks

[Gostev]

Please Google or search this forum for Windows automount. Thanks.

[lars@norstat.no]

On two of my virtual proxies that handle replication sometimes windows will prompt me to format one of the disk's it has mounted or ask me to scan and fix a drive ....

It only prompts me on thoose two servers.

All four servers are made from the same template and are Windows 2008 R2 with automount disabled. All four servers have four SCSI controllers added with one 1gb "dummy" disk not mounted added to each controller so that vmware does not remove the controller.

The difference is that the two servers that are not prompting are 6 core and the two that do is 8 core ....

[Vitaliy S.]

Not sure that the number of cores matters, automount command should do the trick. Does this happen on all processed VMs or just on particular ones?

[1971merlin]

For us, issuing the command DISKPART AUTOMOUNT SCRUB from the commandline of the VM fixed the issue.

My Theory is that VEEAM somehow reads the automount data (Registry?) and tries to mount all the fixed disk volumes in order to back them up. Disks such as iSCSI are considered local (i.e. not removable) therefore fail the mount (because they no longer exist), in turn this fails the VSS snapshot and also generates the erronous "format" dialog on the console.

I discovered this because every server I've had this issue on, has previously backed up using Windows server Backup, to an iSCSI volume - that was the common denominator that pointed to the issue for us.